Social Media Audit: Gaining Essential Clarity

Image credit: M Bartosch

Whether you’re just starting your social media journey, or are fully underway, such is the pace of technological and behavioural change that constant assessment and reassessment is a must. Social media does not stand still, and neither should your thinking.

Quick and meaningful

One of the tools we use to assess in a quick yet meaningful way is the Social Media Audit. It sounds pretty unsexy, doesn’t it? But it’s an exercise which provides a genuine insight into what is happening and not happening, what much be done, and where that sits within your industry and alongside your competitors. We often use this as a pre-strategy phase, to allow us to present a clear view of the “as-is” situation from a very objective standpoint, and to pave the way for defining future direction, opportunity and action.

How it looks

You can pretty easily audit yourself, but even better is to have a third party do it for you, for genuine objectivity. At a very high level it addresses:

Current use of platforms – where, how, who, when

Notable results to date

What’s working, what’s not, what needs to happen next

Internal factors, such as buy-in, engagement and knowledge levels

An assessment of available resource (time, people and money)

Benchmarking against competitors and across relevant industries

Clear vision

What you get at the end of it is a clear view of where you are in social media terms, which you can then hold up against objectives. Is current activity working? Where is it not? Which areas need more or less focus? In addition, it will provide you with a list of immediate remedial work to be done – whether it’s tweaking a process to allow you to respond better, updating profiles, linking platforms or dealing with unmoderated comments. Sometimes these quick fixes can make a big difference.

As with most good social media activity, it’s as much about good planning and process as it about ideas and creativity. Making an audit a regular priority, whether quarterly, six-monthly or yearly, is simply good practice. How else can you be sure that your strategy is working, can be practically managed and is succeeding in setting you apart from the crowd?